Risk-free trial period and how it helped our customers

Trust — the main reason why our potential customers never become real ones is because software development, like any other service, requires client trust. And they lack trust because they don’t know us yet, and don’t know what to expect. For companies with no record of outsourcing, the risk seems prohibitively high at the outset. When we reach out to them, they often respond with a range of arguments or objections, the most popular being:

• ‘We use a different technological stack’,
• ‘We’ve got full-stack setup in India’,
• ‘You guys are X times more expensive than…’
• ‘We do everything in-house’,
• ‘We’ll choose an out-of-the-box solution’,
• ‘We don’t have such needs right now’,
• ‘Do not contact me anymore’, etc…

We’ve been trying different approaches to convince our potential customers to make the right decision, but it was the trial period which proved to be a game-changer. We didn’t merely seek good prospects, or a seamless sales process, but much more — that little magic ingredient that causes a click in one’s head. And by click, I mean the decision to try. Try and stay.

How does the trial period work?

The trial period gives our customers a sense of safety and a flavor of working with our team. It gives them the comfort of experiencing cooperation and making an educated decision. ‘Risk-free’ means that the entire risk is on our side, so it’s not completely risk-free. But it puts us ahead of the competition when running for long-term contracts. You don’t buy a pair of shoes without trying them on first. Similarly, we don’t want our clients to decide whether to start working with us or not, without proper sampling.

A trial period sounds pretty simple, but the devil’s always in the detail, so when we came across the first potential customer to really want to try it out, we had to specify it precisely. This is what we came up with, to ensure both our client and our team felt comfortable about this service:

• The trial period takes 2 weeks.
• The trial period covers real product development, with two complete weekly development cycles: defining requirements, development, testing, delivery of completed features (demo environment). This is the only way for the client to be able to realistically assess our performance and the quality of our work.
• We start with a short (max. 2 days) workshop to decide on the scope to be delivered during this period.
• If the trial period concludes with a continued development, the client pays for the work done, will get the source code and be eligible for all copyright to the product created.
• If the trial period concludes with a decision not to continue, the client doesn’t pay for the work, but also won’t get anything that was built during this period.

In practise, it looks like this:

During the requirements workshop, we create a user story map which looks more or less like this:

The workshop should conclude with enough user stories to cover at least those 2 weeks. It is designed to ensure fluent transition from the aforementioned period to a regular, continuous development process, and allows us to continue without wasting time on re-starting the process and re-writing the backlog.

For the trial period to give our clients a genuine sense of what it means to work with us, it consists of 2 complete software development cycles. And by complete, we mean it all: a detailed plan, a continuous integration and delivery pipeline, a demo environment, UX design and obviously development of a small but complete functional piece of software, which we can proudly show to our client during the demo meeting.

So what would we like to achieve by offering a risk-free trial period?

1. We want to show that we have NOTHING to hide.
2. We want our client to understand our process, attitude and way of working.
3. We’d like to invest in our relationship and gain the trust which will allow us to work more efficiently in the future.
4. We want to display our technical skills.
5. We want to show we’re not afraid to risk, because we know that our client will be willing to continue after that period.
6. Lastly, and most vitally — we want to give our customers the comfort of knowing what they’ll actually be buying, and how much they could benefit from the cooperation.

I feel that this is what often makes a difference between: “not interested, we’re all good” and “Okay guys, let’s try”.